Most SEM guides assume budgets of several thousand euros per month. For an SME starting out with 200–500€ per month, those guides are irrelevant. At that budget level, strategies are different — and you can get results, but you need to play your cards right.
Rules for SEM on a small budget
1. Search only, never display: with 300€ per month, there is no point splitting between the search network and the display network. Search has higher purchase intent. Put the entire budget there.
2. Very specific keywords with high intent: forget generic keywords. Searches like "urgent plumber in Indautxu", "quick divorce lawyer Bilbao", "mechanic’s garage ITV nearby Vitoria". Few searches but extremely high purchase intent.
3. Exact or phrase match type, not broad: broad match on a small budget burns money on irrelevant searches. Phrase match is the balance. Exact for the ones you know best.
4. Strict time scheduling: if your business converts during working hours, don’t advertise at weekends or in the early hours. Every euro must be working when you can respond.
5. One landing page per campaign: don’t send traffic to the home page. A specific landing page per advertised service, with a single CTA.
6. Manual bidding at the start: with fewer than 50 conversions per month, automatic strategies don’t have enough data. Manual CPC allows fine control.
What you absolutely must implement
Impeccable conversion tracking: every conversion must be tracked with its real value. Without this, optimisation is impossible.
Maximum ad extensions: call, location, sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets. All of them. CTR improves by 15–30% with full extensions and they cost nothing extra.
High Quality Score: with a small budget, Quality Score is what makes the difference. A QS of 9-10can pay half as much per click as one of 5-6.Work on keyword-ad-landing relevance.
With this discipline, results with 500€ per month can be comparable to poorly optimised campaigns with 2.000€.